Chapter 5: Not Everyone Has Choices...

As it turned out, I had no chance to get any of those things set up, as later that afternoon, while I was eating a meal at the Hoppin House, a rather downscale pub and one of the few I still had any reputation in, Taval Three-Fingers caught up with me.

Taval was one of Harian’s hangers on and enforcers. Most people who hadn’t met this particularly charming bit of gutter slime might think that he got his name because he only had three fingers on one hand, or some unpleasant physical quirk like that. Unfortunately, that was not the case. You see, he got his name because he was one of Harian’s debt collectors. If someone was significantly late in paying back one of Harian’s loan sharks or was behind on their protection money, or what have you, Harian would dispatch Taval to remind said deadbeat of their responsibilities.

By that I mean, Taval would chop off one of their fingers. This would normally be messy, not to mention in some cases, fatal, but when he went on his debt collections, he always brought a minor mage along with him. The mage would usually be either an apprentice who was too broke to take lessons with the Mage’s Guild, someone who themselves owed a debt (and thus had a certain eagerness to pay it off), or someone who just didn’t have enough spark of the Power to cast more than a minor flame. So, in short, he would remove one of the poor soul’s fingers, and the mage would use some kind of fire spell to cauterize the wound. Then Taval would remind the debtor that if he had to come back, he would have to up the stakes. Maybe to like a full hand, or if Harian was willing to write off whatever debt, it’d be the head And just to make sure the poor debtor didn’t have any ambitions of going to a house of Healing and having it reattached, he would take with him whatever body part he’d removed.

I don’t know how many times the Old Man had to hush up something like that, but I didn’t want to enquire too closely after hearing the story about how he got his name. It seems that he had visited a merchant who was on the verge of being late with his payment, and as a warning, left a finger of the last merchant who tried to stiff Harian. One of his mates asked him “Why’d you leave the finger with him? I mean, all you had to do is show him the finger, and he woulda paid up.” Taval just laughed and finished off his beer, and as he signaled for another one from the much put-upon waitress (by slapping her on the rear end. As I said ... charming fellow). “Nah, I figure if I left it there, the sonuvabitch would remember me, every time he looked at the finger.” He laughed coarsely, and then as the barmaid returned with another tankard of ale, he sent her away again with another slap of her ass. He paused a couple seconds to take a long drink of ale, and then he grinned at his fellow thugs. “Besides, I got three more fingers back home waiting for the next poor bastard. And I do mean POOR.”

His coterie found this immensely amusing. Me, I’d rather not think about any of it. There was a part of me that originally thought that “Hey, they knew the terms of the deal. If they didn’t want to risk such a thing, then they coulda gone somewhere else.” Then I saw the folks that Harian preyed on. In a lot of cases, these people weren’t ever getting out from under Harian’s thumb. Sure, there was the variety of drunkards, and Smoking-Dragon-Chasers, you know, the people who would sit around smoking an intoxicating pipe all day? They called it Chasing the Dragon. They might have changed it since. As I said, I try to avoid those types of places. I’m talking about a merchant family who had one shipment go missing. Or in more than one case, a family with good looking daughters who had caught Harian or one of his other thugs’ attention. Sometimes I wondered why I hadn’t left Tortar City long ago. But, thankfully for my attachments, Taval wasn’t here to collect a debt. Unfortunately, for my future, he let me know that Harian wanted to speak with me. I didn’t know what it would be about, but it probably wouldn’t be good. I understood at that point that I was going to have to make a choice, real soon, and that was going to limit my choices going forward.

I understood in a small way. I mean, I was a Rogue. I was part of the criminal underbelly of the city. Just like they did, I gave a percentage of my take to the Old Man. The fact I was nominally a freelancer and didn’t take direct orders from them didn’t mean if the Old Man had called me in and asked me to “do him a favor”, as long as it didn’t violate my code, there’d be no way I’d refuse the request. That’s why I was sure the Old Man would never ask me to violate my code, because then if I refused, things would get DIFFICULT.

Sometimes it felt like the Code was the only thing that separated me from the real scum of the city. That’s why I usually carried nothing but defensive weaponry if I could get away with it. I mean, you could do some pretty good damage if you were properly trained with a pair of Tang’fa sticks, similar to those that the City Watch carried around to club anyone who resisted being taken in with. But there’s a difference between a defensive weapon, and something designed for killing. I didn’t want anything to do with that. That was part of my Code and had been part of it ever since my 13th year. To teach me this lesson, Thallid had called in a favor from ... well, I don’t want to know whom, and he brought me to one of the city’s morgues to teach me this lesson.

He opened the first drawer, and inside, was an old noble man. He obviously came from wealth, while he didn’t have the tag of a Merchant on him, he was dressed in finery, even in death. He looked, calm, at peace. He waited until I had memorized the features of the man, and then without saying a word, closed it. He opened another one, and in this one, I saw the body of a woman, maybe having seen twenty season-cycles who had been knifed in the streets during a riot. He continued the silence, and opened a third container, and this one hit me. Inside was the emaciated form of a young girl, no more than six cycles old who had probably starved to death.

He then closed the third one, said something in a language I didn’t recognize. He later told me it was the “Kamita Akaa”, the Hebroa Prayer For the Repose of the Dead. That it was an invocation to the Hebroa gods to speed the souls of those whose bodies we had just viewed to their reward. I’m not sure if he was Hebroan himself. It was one of those things that he kept close. We didn’t speak until we were back at the basement we were using as a training ground. Well, he didn’t speak, and I didn’t feel like talking much either, not after what I had seen...

The old Noble had lived a long and fruitful life. The young woman was taken by surprise in the middle of a confused scrum, not knowing what was happening until the knife had already plunged into her. The young girl had never had a chance at all. It seemed, cruel to grant someone life, and turn it into such agony.

He gathered himself after starting a mug of tea brewing on the old stove, before turning towards me and speaking quietly. “The reason I have shown you this today is not because I think you will end up like any of those three. But I wanted to give you a view of the choices that our Souls face.

The Old Noble. He had every choice. He made every choice. He was the Captain of his fate, as the bards would say. The only choice that was denied him was the one that faces us all at the end of our lives.

The Young Woman. She was on the cusp of being successful in the world, at least as much as her world would allow. She didn’t have the choices that the Old Noble would have, but she made the best she could of those choices. Until someone made a choice that ended all her choices forever.

And the girl. Did she ever have a choice? She didn’t choose to be born, or to be abandoned to an uncaring world. She certainly didn’t choose to starve to death, while there are people in this city who routinely throw away more food in a day then she would have in a month. To say she was given a choice would be absurd.

That’s why I’m training you the way I am. When you kill somebody, you’re taking away all their choices. All their decisions. All their chances. And I know, you’re thinking that there are a lot of people that deserve death. That may be true. But before you take a life, you must ask yourself if there’s a chance that they will make better choices. The Gods know that every soul has a destination. Are you so sure of your purpose that you are willing to send that soul to a destination, despite the fact they could be saved?”

I mean, this was really heavy stuff. Especially for a thirteen-year-old who thought he was immortal. I mean, I still had a bit of the wink and nod at danger in me, even now. I couldn’t be a Rogue without it. But it’s tempered with knowing that somewhere, sometime down the road, it was statistically likely that I was going to get myself into something so deep that no number of rules, no number of plans, no amount of fast-talking could get me out of it. Where was MY soul headed? And was there going to be a day when that choice was going to be taken from me? It kept me up sometimes.

I think that’s why I spend and give away all my money as soon as I earned it ... The old saying about you can’t take it with you, but if I was going to live, then I wanted to make every choice that I could. That’s why I never signed on with the Old Man or Auntie here in Tortar City, or any of the other crime lords in the cities of the Eight Kingdoms. I was going to be free to make MY choices. Nobody was going to make my choices for me.

I remember after thinking about it for a while, and looking at him, with the unusually blank look in his eyes. I remembered being on the cusp of understanding, but I had to ask to be sure. “Thallid, have you killed before?”

The blank look in his eyes became the door to his own personal Hell at that moment. He looked at me, before going to the stove, turning it off, and unlocking the (as always, well-stocked) alcoholic beverages cabinet, grabbed a bottle of Kapitol Firewater, poured himself a tea mug full, and drank it down in one large quaff, before refilling it, and then looking back at me.

“Too Many Times. Way Too Many Times. And if the gods are cruel to me, I will add to that number.”

He then took the mug, the bottle of Firewater, and went into his room and shut the door behind him, the lock rattling into place moments later, to drink away the memories of all the choices he had taken from others.